


Just One Day

by ziegler



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Edeleth, Edeleth Week (Fire Emblem), F/F, Femslash, Fluff, Lesbian, Marriage, Reminiscing, Romance, SPOILERSSSSSSS, Spoilers, Wedding Day, Yuri, did i mention..., dorothea x petra, idk their ship name but theyre cute af!, set after the end of crimson flower route so be WARNED
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-23 00:47:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20883401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziegler/pseuds/ziegler
Summary: It's Edelgard's wedding day, and she finds that even she can get nervous after all.





	Just One Day

**Author's Note:**

> i finished the crimson flower route and married edelgard and everything was so good...i don't know what to do with my life anymore...i love them so much...please
> 
> anyway i heard through the grapevine that this week is apparently edeleth week(?) so i wrote something fitting for them in my opinion haha. enjoy!

Edelgard had been waiting for this day for what felt like forever.

“Your Majesty,” an attendant says as she pokes her head around the large oak door of Edelgard’s chambers. “Your fiancée is almost ready.”

“…Thank you.”

The attendant closes the door as Edelgard replies curtly; before she finds her face buried in her hands uncharacteristically, and the cooing of her former classmates and comrades in the war scuttling around her.

“You’re really doing it, then?” Mercedes asks with a warm smile. “You and Byleth…aah, it’s so romantic!”

“It really is!” Annette chips in, adjusting the elaborate ribbon that is tied around Edelgard’s waist. “The two of you have been through so much together…this was really the only outcome!”

Edelgard von Hresvelg – the most influential ruler of her time – found herself blushing as she stood before her full-length mirror.

“…Please,” she begins wearily, “You’re all teasing me so mercilessly today…”

“If not today, then when?” Dorothea interjects with a wink and a chuckle, fixing the floral, gold-hemmed veil over Edelgard’s platinum blonde hair. “Almost got it…ah! There we go.”

“You are looking beautiful, Edelgard,” Petra says coolly as Dorothea rushes back over to stand at her girlfriend’s side, and smiles after she kisses her on the cheek. “Byleth is a lady with much luck to have you at her side forever.”

“Forever…” Edelgard repeats to herself, and her lavender eyes find themselves staring at her appearance in the gleaming, large mirror before her.

“Our wedding’s next!” Dorothea beams as Petra chuckles throatily, and clings to her loved one’s arm. “I take it you’ll all be coming to that in a couple of months, right?”

“Of course!” Mercedes replies with a warm smile. “If you’ll have us.”

“It would be a pleasure…” Petra says as she blushes a little, and Dorothea pinches her cheeks.

“You’re so cute, Petra.”

“Please be stopping. My cheeks are losing their feeling.”

Edelgard, meanwhile, finds herself swallowing down the mixture of pure excitement and utter terror that swirls around her brain. She knows, as does everyone around her, that today was a momentous occasion in history. After all, this wasn’t just a case of _Edelgard_ wedding the woman that she had fallen in love with from the first moment she saw her anymore. No, this was the _Emperor’s_ wedding day. A _royal_ wedding, and the first big one in the Empire since the destruction and dismantling of the nobles system.

Today would go down in history, and Byleth would go from simply being her lover behind closed doors to actually co-ruling this entire operation as her _Empress_.

Edelgard von Hresvelg had turned out, in the end, to be immensely popular with the public – and even from her dressing room, Edelgard could hear that they had turned out in droves to watch her take Byleth’s hand in marriage. After the destruction of the Immaculate One and the rebuilding of the Capital’s city after the flames, Edelgard had delivered on all of her promises. The crest system was no more. The noble and poor divide was fast diminishing. Edelgard von Hresvelg; with Byleth at her side; had finally been able to cultivate and carve the very world she wanted to see. Civilization, under the rule of Edelgard, had been truly flourishing.

What better time to take the woman you love as your own in the eyes of the world?

But today was so much more than just a royal wedding. This, at its core, was _Edelgard’s_ wedding. Not the Emperor of the newly birthed Empire, but instead Edelgard von Hresvelg, a person made up of feelings and blood, just like the rest of the world. This day was for the human that rest within the strong shell of red armour that had so often been spattered with blood and tears in the battlefield.

Edelgard’s heart had been completely captivated by Byleth for such a long time, and her mind had always gone wherever Byleth went.

Edelgard von Hresvelg was always so much more than just an Emperor – she was a woman.

When Byleth disappeared, Edelgard knew that it felt like a piece of her was missing, too. Whenever Byleth wasn’t at her side, it felt empty. A world without her was no world that Edelgard ever wanted to be a part of.

“How do I look?” Edelgard asks her wedding day entourage, a coy smile on her face, but her words betray her faux confidence, and slip out from a shaky tongue. It infuriates her to feel any sense of nervousness after all she had been through to get here; but today, she just can’t help herself. A thousand questions race through her head. A thousand feelings encircle her heart. A thousand different ways to feel anxious begin to blossom inside her mind.

“You look great, Edelgard. Stop worrying,” Lysithea firmly states, and folds her arms. “You should just focus on the feelings of happiness instead of those of terror, you know? Haven’t you wanted this for a long time?”

“Of course I have…” Edelgard replies, offended that Lysithea thinks her nerves were merely a case of indecision; before Lysithea chuckles to herself, and stands up to hand Edelgard a glass of water.

“Calm down. You’re nervous now…but when you see Byleth, all of this will melt away.”

As she takes the glass in hand, Edelgard closes her eyes and steadies her breathing. She knows that everybody is right, and in her heart, it soothes her feelings of nervousness about standing before the registrar at the throne. Byleth will be there, looking at her in an outfit that Edelgard wouldn’t have seen her in before, and that alone is enough to make her lips curve into a smile.

Edelgard sips at the water, and takes the quiet moment that she has standing here before all of her occupied friends to think.

She had never been a woman for daydreams. Was this the first time she had finally been able to follow through on a daydream she’d had, of marrying Byleth? After all, she was a woman that strictly functioned on ambition alone; living and breathing through actually attainable goals, Edelgard found her strength in achieving them. With a strong army at her side and a woman in her heart, Edelgard knew she could overcome any obstacle.

Romance was a far off dream. It was unrealistic, back then. But not now.

Now, Edelgard von Hresvelg is so in love it hurts. The ways Byleth kisses her lips, the ways Byleth says her name; even just the way Byleth _walks_ makes her fall more in love. And in these moments, as she closes her eyes to calm her nerves, stood in the gorgeous, alabaster beauty of her wedding dress; she thinks back to one of her favourite moments that her and Byleth ever got the luxury of sharing.

As it happened, this moment was only a few days old, but it was a moment that Edelgard knew would sustain her through even the most dire of her days.

She remembers everything about it in great detail. She remembers the way her red velvet curtains hung loosely across the large windows of her chambers, and the ways that her leg had been slightly hanging out of the bed as she slept, making it feel a little cold as she slipped it under the silken blankets once more.

“…Oh, it’s morning…”

Edelgard remembers the words that creaked out of her mouth, too.

With a morning’s husky whisper decorating her pretty voice, she had allowed her eyes to flicker open to the sight of the gentle light coming in through the curtains; faint particles of dust and ambience floating aimlessly within its stream. Edelgard remembers how the bed she shared with Byleth was feeling particularly soft that morning, and she remembers how the body against her arm was so warm.

Edelgard remembers how that was one of the first times she had finally been able to feel like she could stand still and fully appreciate her life. The things surrounding her had gone from a cold, untrusting dark to a beautiful, embracing, wholly loving light. The stillness of victory had been ringing in her ears for months after the defeat of the Archbishop Rhea, and that without a doubt contributed to this memory-worthy morning; but what Edelgard had adored the most, what mattered to her the very most of all, was that the woman she loved was here with her.

“Byleth…are you awake?”

Edelgard turned gently to her side to see the sleeping visage of the woman in question, and found her heart flutter as she saw her sleeping soundly.

Byleth’s beautiful, navy hair had returned after the death of Rhea. And as opposed to hanging limply over Edelgard’s arms as she cried on her knees for fear Byleth had died, this time, it was comfortably draped against the whites of their pillows.

Edelgard smiled as she thought on how she had fallen completely in love with the violet of Byleth’s natural eyes, because somehow, getting to see her beloved’s colours return felt like another excuse to fall in love with her all over again.

Byleth slept warmly and undisturbed, despite Edelgard’s prompting whisper; and to Edelgard, that was more than fine.

It meant she could look at her like this for a long time, after all. Her eyes could scan all the lines of a face that she knew so well now.

And Edelgard knew, at that moment, that she was living in one of her favourite memories. The sense of self-awareness enveloping her entire being, every touch of Byleth’s skin felt so much more heightened, so much more appreciated. Tucking a strand of her dark hair behind her ear, Edelgard shifted her body weight downwards beneath the sheets a little more, just to level their noses with one another; and the delight of feeling Byleth’s breath softly tickle at her cheek was something Edelgard couldn’t get enough of.

“Mm…” Byleth stirred, and Edelgard remembers the way her heart skipped a beat. “El?”

“…Did I wake you?” Edelgard remembers mumbling with an embarrassed smile that Byleth could have only heard in her sleepy haze. “I’m sorry, darling.”

“No, no…” Byleth says in reply sleepily, and lazily drapes her arms around Edelgard’s waist. “Come here.”

The affection levels. _That_ was what Edelgard couldn’t stop falling in love with. It was an alien luxury, to feel such love.

Edelgard loved the ways that in the daytime, Byleth would sometimes just go and buy her flowers just to make her feel good. She loved the way that at night, Byleth would hold her so close that Edelgard could perfectly identify every note of her perfume; and the ways that sometimes, when they lay in bed, a goodnight kiss could easily become something much more intense; and sometimes, it was just nice for Byleth to wrap her arms around her midriff and fall asleep like that.

_This is heaven_, Edelgard had thought, _and if I had to go through everything that I did just to get to this point, then it was all worth it. _

In the present moment of the large chambers near to the throne room, still surrounded by her friends and comrades, Edelgard is still standing before her mirror. With a mixture of fear and apprehension and utter adoration gripping her like a vice, she stares at the glinting engagement ring on her finger.

She remembers the way that, almost as soon as the war had ended, Byleth had given her the ring.

“This was the ring my father had given to my mother,” Byleth had said, a shy smile on her lips, and with such a look on her face that Edelgard can’t stand to think about it for too long for fear of melting. “And now…”

“…Byleth?”

Byleth had laughed as the two women blushed together, and Edelgard gasped as she took a step forwards.

“I want to give this to you, El.”

“Edelgard?”

“Ah!”

Edelgard is snapped out of her daydreams of Byleth, and turns to face the voice of Bernadetta stood sheepishly besides the door.

She shakes her head in resignation as Bernadetta clears her throat, and wrings her hands together as she enters fully. 

“What is it, Bernie?” Edelgard asks gently. Bernadetta wears an excited smile all over her face, and Edelgard feels the white panic settling into her bones as she realizes just what that means.

“I-It’s time to go!” Bernadetta says eagerly, and Edelgard feels the pressure of a million eyes of the world soon to be on her.

“Is that so…” She replies in an attempt to remain calm. Bernadetta nods.

“Aah, you’re so brave…the crowds out there are insane!”

Edelgard closes her eyes in exasperation, and there is a collective groan amongst the women in the room.

“Bernadetta…” Lysithea groans. Petra slaps a hand to her head, and Annette and Mercedes shuffle awkwardly in disbelief.

“Eh?!”

“Bernie!” Dorothea quickly whispers. Bernadetta buttons her lip, but Edelgard’s head is already spinning.

She was never too good with large crowds, and least of all, hundreds of thousands of strangers all lining up outside to watch the declarations of love between her and the woman she wanted to keep all to herself as it was.

“Ah! I-I’m sorry!” Bernadetta apologizes profusely.

“No…” Edelgard says with a shake of her head. “It’s alright.”

_Byleth…_

_Are you prepared for a life with me like this?_

“Alright,” Mercedes says as they all begin to walk towards the door in excitement. “I think it’s time, Edelgard.”

The questions had been racing through Edelgard’s mind ever since the date of the wedding had gotten closer, but this was something else.

_Will Byleth still love me in a year? Will she love me in five? Ten? _

_What if I’m too much for her? What if she grows tired of married life? _

_Will we always work out? _

_Will you always love me, Byleth?_

As her footsteps echo in the hallway of the grand palace, Edelgard finds that she can hear more and more of the people awaiting the balcony outside for her and Byleth to kiss formally before them. She feels the clockwork cogs in her stomach churning, ticking over as though this well-oiled machine wasn’t prepared for any of this.

_Is this the most terrified I’ve ever been?_

Edelgard’s knuckles are white as they hold on to her bouquet; but, after a few moments, Petra places a hand on her shoulder as they trail slightly behind the others.

“…Ah?”

“Do not be worrying, Edelgard,” Petra reassures, and Edelgard listens intently to her words. “Today might be bringing you nerves, but the rest of your life will go according to plan.”

“According to plan?” Edelgard asks curiously.

“Perhaps not _your_ plan,” Petra replies with a laugh, “but _a_ plan. Everything that is meant to happen will happen, Edelgard. And you know, as we all are knowing, that you and Byleth are meant to be.”

Edelgard feels a little bashful at hearing someone else talking so bluntly about her relationship, and Edelgard finds herself holding the bouquet of carnations a little closer to her chest as they walk.

“What makes you say that?”

“The two of you…” Petra begins, and Edelgard listens to her making a noise of contemplation. “How to put it…you are much like Dorothea and I.”

“Hm?”

Petra is the one who blushes this time, as they stop just short of the archway through to the throne room; and suddenly, Edelgard can hear the sound of people excitedly chirping outside.

But the noise doesn’t make a difference much to Edelgard in the end, because Petra says with a nervous laugh,

“You are completing each other,”

and Edelgard suddenly feels so much calmer about thoughts of the future.

As she enters the throne room, the pressure is very real. The future anxieties are dissipating, but she’s still panicking. Thoughts of her and Byleth won’t stop on any given day, but at this point in time, her mind goes blank. It is almost as though any kind of nerve training or preparation for this day has flown entirely out of the window, and Edelgard knows that just around the corner, stood in front of the throne, is the registrar and her loved one.

Byleth opted to get ready with their other comrades; Leonie, Manuela and Lindhardt, to name but a few; and Edelgard could just about see the tell-tale navy blue sleeve of a formally dressed woman poking out from behind the throne.

“…Byleth…” she whispers to herself.

Edelgard took a few steps forwards; and, in that moment, Edelgard realized that she had never been so grateful for the sight of her loved one before.

It was almost as though all of her worrying had been completely for naught.

Just to see Byleth, smiling just for her…

“El!” Byleth announces in a sheer delight, and Edelgard watches as her lover’s eyes begin to become hypnotized by her appearance.

“…Hello,” Edelgard says with a coy smile, and as she drew closer to her fiancée, she couldn’t help but feel her ego growing ten times bigger when Byleth gasps under her breath.

Edelgard can see her eyes scanning every single line of her dress. The gold-tipped veil, the bright bouquet of carnations; Byleth is besotted. Edelgard feels her cheeks almost going as red as the petals in her bouquet, and thinks with an internal laugh to how this reminds her _very_ much of Byleth seeing the portrait she painted of her all those months ago for the first time.

“Edelgard, you…” Byleth began, utterly speechless at the sight of her bride. “You look…you look completely beautiful.”

Edelgard feels an involuntary smile rising to the surface, and turned to face the sight of the registrar who was looking at the two of them with an expectant smile.

“You look incredibly handsome,” Edelgard whispers, knowing that she’s making an understatement to Byleth. Byleth chuckles.

“Thank you.”

“Are you both prepared to commence the ceremony?” The registrar asks; a warm, approving look in her old eyes. “This is a little different to the former marriages proposed by the Church.”

“We’re ready,” Edelgard says bluntly, “we are to say our vows and sign a piece of paper, correct?”

“That is correct, Your Majesty.”

Edelgard and Byleth take another look at each other; and, as they stand before the archway that leads out to an uproariously jubilant crowd outside, both women know with complete clarity that they see the entire world in each other’s eyes.

Edelgard is the first to say her vows. She almost tears up saying them, overwhelmed by her emotion of the last few years and the utter adoration she holds inside for Byleth, standing before her looking so handsome, and Byleth encourages her to hold it together with her eyes. Edelgard can’t help but fall even harder as they stand, building the foundation of this memory inside her mind as they hold hands, and Byleth finds that when the time comes to say her vows, she almost tears up, too.

But they say them. And they sign the paper. And, as the ink begins to dry on the parchment, Byleth and Edelgard make their way out onto the alabaster balcony of the palace inside the capital; and the crowd begins to shiver with an excited happiness that Edelgard knows couldn’t be replicated again.

“…Ready?” Byleth says to her over the noise of the crowds. “We’re married now, El. How does it feel?”

Edelgard chuckles to herself, her nerves now a thing of the past, even before this huge crowd; and, with their comrades all aligned behind them happily, Dorothea a mess of tears and tissues as she clings to Petra; Edelgard turns to her lover with a bright, beaming smile on her face.

“I feel as though you were always an inevitability, my love.”

And, moving in towards Byleth’s slightly taller frame, Edelgard tilts her head upwards to kiss her lover’s lips before the world’s smiling eyes upon them.

Edelgard von Hresvelg is in love; and, as the cheers of happiness roar through the Capital, the rest of the world is in love right along with her.

**Author's Note:**

> feel free to follow me on twitter over [@gloomhoarder](http://www.twitter.com/gloomhoarder)! thank you! ♥


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